What else?

“It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer.”

William of Occam

“We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.”

Isaac Newton

“The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”

Albert Einstein

The concept of simplicity in theory bulding and scientific modeling dates back to William of Ockham, a prominent 14th centry philosopher and logician. The principle attributed to him is called Occam’s razor or principle of parsimony according to which from otherwise equivalent theories that explain a phenomenon, the simplest one should be chosen.

The bellow paragraph (taken from www.wikipedia.org ) illusterates this principle in scientific modeling and hypothesis making: 

“The primary activity of science, formulating theories and selecting the most promising theory based on analysis of collected evidence, is not possible without some method of selecting between theories which do fit the evidence. It’s easy, for example, to think of alternative theories which fit the currently available data equally as well as Newton’s famous theory that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. One such theory would be that for every action there is an opposite action of half intensity, but benevolent indetectable creatures magnify the opposing action with input of their own energy so it appears to be equal; these creatures will all die in the year 2055, and at that point the observable nature of the universe will instantly shift. Owing to the creatures being undetectable, the alternative theory is practically impossible to disprove by definition. These two theories have profoundly different implications for what we should expect of the future, and the number of such possible theories is at least trivially infinite by method of uncreatively incrementing the year (2056 is another theory, 2057 is another theory, and so on).”